The Department of Redundancy, Redundancy Department

Today I’m starting another Adapting-In-Place Class, beginning with the basics of evaluating whether you have a future where you are, what your other choices are, and then triaging your situation, but I’ve already written a good bit about those things, so I want to a basic and essential element of triage - establishing redundant systems.

Why redundant systems? Well, for the simple reason that, as Yeats put, things fall apart. We all know this - in fact, we all rely regularly on redundant systems. For example, when your commuter vehicle breaks, you take the bus, carpool with a neighbor, borrow from your spouse or a friend or rent a car. Implicit in your commitment to your job is the reality that your car will break, and that you will find yourself in need of a redundant system to back you up. If you have children, you are are intimately familiar with the filling out of forms that list several “emergency contacts” - that is, people who can be trusted to tend your kids if you are not there. This is a form of redundancy - thus, if your son takes sick at school, you have a neighbor or relative who can respond, and if not them, usually another person still who can be tried. The assumption is that with parents plus multiple redundant backups, someone will always be there for your kids.

But most of us don’t have good redundant systems for our home and our lives, if the basic assumptions of our existence, which include full access to grid power and other utilities; an immediate government response to a crisis and the availability of replacement parts, utilities and tools, as well as people to install them and the money to pay for it are all available. That is, the redundancy in our system all presumes a fully functional economy, energy system and a fairly stable society. In the absence of each of these things, most of us are tremendously vulnerable.

One of the first and most basic presumptions we all need to make is this - failure is normal. This is not a prediction - I am not claiming that any particular scenario is likely. But the reality is that nearly everything breaks, falls apart or is vulnerable in some way to not-terrifically-unlikely disasters. Your plans for the future should work from the assumption that things will unfold messily, and with copious system failures. I’ve written more about this here: http://sharonastyk.com/2008/12/13/inconceivable-why-failure-is-normal-and-should-be-part-of-the-planbut-isnt/ I wrote about our strange reluctance to seriously consider the possibility of failure on both a personal and world scale,

“…this leads to a painful reality - despite the fact that winter power outages happen out my way all the time, we know for a fact that the extended outages in my region there will leave us with people who are freezing, and hungry, isolated and unable to cope. They won’t have the batteries for their flashlights, or any strategy for cooking or eating. At best, they will come out of this traumatized and miserable. At worst, some of them may actually die.

But we also know that these folks will be deemed normal, and their lack of preparation will be treated as normal. Just as people in California with no earthquake preparations or folks in Florida with no preparations for a Hurricane will be treated as normal. We treat a lack of preparedness, in our society, as completely reasonable and rational, even expected. Thus, if you are in line at a Red Cross shelter because you have no food and water in your home 48 hours after a hurricane hit Gainesville, odds are no one will even raise an eyebrow and ask why in heck you don’t have any food.

My point is not to pick on anyone (and yes, I know that there are some people who don’t have enough food access to have a reserve, but that hardly describes everyone) - in fact, I think the reason that we look upon the lack of personal contingency plans as so reasonable is that it isn’t just personal - our society as a whole has very few contingency plans - much less strategies for adapting to failure. We regard planning for anything bad as a sign of an unhealthy focus on the negative. We feel it is so unhealthy that we find that at every level of our culture - from the purely personal question of whether we have a strategy for dealing with common disasters to the international policy level where no one seems to have ever asked any questions about what might go wrong on a host of subjects - we have no contingency plans. Not only do we not have them, but we dismiss and deride anyone who suggests we make them.

All of which suggests that we have a very troubled relationship to the idea of failure. Speaking as someone whose entire body of work could probably be summarized as “Ummm…have you thought about what happens if something goes wrong?” I’m acutely aware of how unpleasant and frightening most of us find the idea of failure - and because we find it unpleasant and frightening, we are likely to dramatically underestimate its likelihood and frequency, and be truly shocked when failures happen. But in fact, we shouldn’t be shocked - failure is far more routine and normal than we expect. Not only is it normal, but treating it as normal might actually reduce the likelihood of disaster.”

And if we do have backup systems, often those systems are themselves vulnerable to failure, and we may or may not have further redundancies in the system. Now some systems don’t need much redundancy - for example, if you mostly keep ice cream in your freezer, even if you are very fond of ice cream, you don’t actually need a backup plan or system to compensate for the failure of your freezer - one doesn’t actually need Ben and Jerry’s to live, even if it is Cherry Garcia ;-), so no redundant system is required. But let’s say that your freezer holds most of your stored food, including a lot of high value meats and produce that you rely on, and that would cost you more than 1,000 to replace. Well, you think, I’ll get a generator. Maybe you even install it, and store some gas for it. But the problem is that a generator is a short term solution - it is great for a few days of power outage, and will keep that food cold. But what if, as happened last year in Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Iowa, Texas and several other states, the power is out for more than a few days? What happens when the gas for the generator runs out, and the gas stations have no power to pump more? Your redundancy assumes that things will get back to normal quickly - but what if that’s not the case?

The reality is that if your redundancies depend on fossil fuels, on just in time delivery of parts you don’t keep on hand, on government response being there on the ground quickly, on disasters being so localized that nearby other places can send help, rather than widespread, on somehow, things working out, your redundancies aren’t adequate - period.

Now this could end up an infinite reduction game - you could make the case that the need for redundancy never stops, and on some level, you’d be right. Let’s say my backup plan for that freezer is different - it involves me taking my pressure canner and canning up the meat in the freezer on my wood cookstove. Now someone could legitimately say “well, but what if your stove breaks, or the canner does. Doesn’t that mean you need an infinite number of canners, a backup woodstove and an infinite number of monkeys to type while you do the preserving?

There’s some truth in this - all things fail, all good things come to an end. On the other hand, the wood cookstove I own comes from a brand where 100 year old models are routinely used. Mine is less than 5 years old. There are a couple of parts that might break, and that’s why I keep a stove gasketing kit around, and have my own chimney brushes. And it is possible that some unusual situation might occur. Which is one of the reasons I’m glad I know how to make a rocket stove - and have a big old can big enough to put a canning kettle on, although I haven’t made it yet. I also make sure that there’s nothing in my freezer I can’t afford to lose - yes, I like what I have there, but I don’t allow myself to rely on it as my primary source of food. If worst came to worst, we’d invite all the neighbors for a feast and go forward from there - I don’t really need more than that plan in my head, because I know I can lose the stuff there.

So a set of redundant systems depends on several things. First, a backup that is well made and simple - or if cheap and complex, a bunch of them. Given that I don’t like the idea of buying a lot of cheap stuff, I’d prefer the former, but sometimes that may not be viable. Second, if the system is essential, you need the tools and equipment and ability to take care of it and repair it. That means looking critically over your backup systems and asking what parts might break, and how to fix them if they do. I have a box in my closet that contains only repair kits for things - often, when making a major purchase, the item comes with an inexpensive repair kit, that contains replacement pieces of things that are most likely to show wear - rust remover and stove gaskets for a cookstove, bearing oil and replacement bearings for my spinning wheel, a sewing machine belt and replacement needles for a treadle machine, etc… Now occasionally these are a scam, providing cheap parts rather than useful ones, but with well made equipment, often they aren’t. Making sure you also know how to use them - that you’ve downloaded instructions, say for, say mending harness or replacing parts on your water pumping wind turbine. Ideally, try it before you have to do it in the rain, at night, by flashlight, since that’s how it always works.

The other thing that’s needed is a mental plan to deal with failure - ok, what if my well pump breaks just when I need it? Well, I know I can filter water from the creek, and from my rainbarrels. Let’s just make sure I have enough filters or water purifying tablets. Also, how much do I mind the idea of my final, mental back up plan? I think I’d find hauling all our water from our creek really annoying. If that’s the case, and I can afford it, I should probably make sure that we have a backup well pump system.

If you do want a complex, and fossil fuel based backup - ie, you want solar panels to keep your freezer running or a generator or whatever, make sure you a. know how to fix it and b. keep tools and parts on hand. And also make sure you have a non-fossilized backup, just in case.

Redundancies can and should include sharing with others, relying on others for help, etc… We don’t always need a tool, so much as we need people. But if your plans include these, ask yourself - am I lending a helping hand now? Do I have relationships to rely on for this? If not, time to make them happen.

How much redundancy do you need? At a minimum, I think you should be as unreliant on high energy, high complexity systems as possible. For some people, comfortable living with very little, in a simple way, this will mean almost no complexities. For those tied by major illness to high energy medical systems, or caught in situations where they cannot live without these, it may still be possible to minimize resource use elsewhere, while building up as much of a safety net as possible elsewhere. Not every person will be able to do every thing - but the more you can build redundant systems into your plan, the happier and more comfortable your lives will be.

Editorial Notes: Sharon's new book Independence Days "...focuses on food preservation and storage as an essential tool both for enabling local food systems, and also as an urgently necessary project in the face of a growing hunger crisis that threatens all of us. It will be available from New Society Publishing in the fall of 2009." -KS

Sharon Astyk is a writer, teacher, blogger, polymath and farmer who covers issues that range from agiculture to energy policy, from food preservation and cooking to religious life and democracy, while trying to …

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